Philip Cohen published an interesting post using Web of Science data to show how academics talk about inequality in the 1980s to present. Phil looks at variations of the phrase “race, class, gender”, and the rise of “social inequality” over “social stratification”, in the titles of journal articles.

Here’s another slice at the topic. I used JStor’s Data for Research database (all articles in their collection) and restricted the sample to research articles published between 1980-2012.** Then I looked at the percentage of articles that mention inequality** that also mention: race, sex/gender, or both race and sex/gender.*** Here’s the resulting graph:

Percentage of research articles that mention social, economic, income, or wealth inequality in JStor that also mention race, sex or gender, or both.

Obviously, mentioning inequality, race, or gender anywhere in the text of an article is a much lower threshold than mentioning things in the title. So, this slice at the corpus of academic research is more like a lower bound on interest in intersectional inequalities, while Phil is looking at something like an upper bound (articles that go so far as to include those terms in their title). Also, here I am looking only at those articles that mention inequality of some sort to see which kinds of inequality are mentioned (“inequality articles” for short). Given that, we can see two clear trends: inequality articles are much more likely to mention both race and sex/gender in recent years (doubling from around 17% in 1980 to around 34% in 2012). In the meantime, discussion of race and gender in general have also increased significantly (from 33% of inequality articles mentioning sex or gender in 1980 to 59% in 2012; and 29% to 45% for race).

With this data, we can also compare the observed co-occurrence of race and sex/gender to the rate we’d expect if mentions were independent. That is, given that 33% of inequality articles mentioned race and 29% mentioned in sex/gender in 1980, we’d expect about 9% to mention both simply by chance. The actual rate is 17%. For 2012, the “expected” rate based on independence is about 27% compared to an observed rate of 34%. So, the overall increase in articles mentioning race and sex/gender is pretty consistent with the increase in mentions of the two terms separately.

What do you all think?

EDIT: Inspired by Philip’s comment, I made another simple chart looking at research articles in JStor. Here I look at the percentage of article that use both the terms “racial inequality” and “gender inequality” as a percentage of articles using either term. Here’s a plot of a 2-year moving average of those results.

I restricted the time period here to 1990-2012 (1989-2012 considering the 2 year average) because of sharp uptick in gender as a term in the 1980s and the relatively small N of any mentions of gender inequality from the 1980s (i.e. just 2 articles in 1980). Mostly, not a lot of trend here. Are these the right terms though?

* JStor’s database excludes many publications for a couple years after publication, so the sample size drops considerably for the last two years.
** Specifically, any of the phrases “social inequality”, “economic inequality”, “wealth inequality”, or “income inequality.”
*** In the early part of the 1980s, “gender” was still much less commonly used than sex (cf. nGrams). I use “sex/gender” to refer to articles containing at least one of sex or gender.

Regulators, much like market actors, rely on categorical distinctions. Innovations that are ambiguous to regulatory categories but not to market actors present a problem for regulators and an opportunity for innovative firms. Using a wide range of primary and secondary, qualitative and quantitative sources, we trace the history of one class of innovative financial derivatives—interest rate and foreign exchange swaps—to show how these instruments undermined the separation of commercial and investment banking established by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 even as overt political action failed to do so. Swaps did not fit neatly into existing product categories—futures, securities, loans—and thus evaded regulatory scrutiny for many years. The market success of swaps put commercial and investment banks into direct competition and, in so doing, undermined Glass–Steagall. Drawing on this case, we theorize that ambiguous innovations may disrupt the regulatory status quo and shift the political burden onto parties that want to maintain existing regulations. Our findings also suggest that category-spanning innovations may be more valuable to market participants if regulators find them difficult to interpret.

Many readers of this blog gave us helpful advice over the past four years; thank you all very much! And let us know what you think of the paper.

Josh Barro wrote a somewhat controversial op-ed in the NYT attempting to apply the Coase theorem to the negotiation between passengers on a plane about whether or not to recline their seats. Economist Greg Mankiw and political theorist Jim Johnson each posted a short reaction to the paper. See if you can spot the difference in tone. First, here’s Mankiw:

Let’s coin a new phrase: “statistical optimism.” Statistical optimism refers to the belief that if only we had better statistics about X, and that everyone was made aware of those statistics, then we would make better decisions about X and some set of problems would go away without any major changes in the institutions actually making decisions. It’s a practical, quanty version of the classic Enlightenment-style idea that more knowledge always makes things better. Note that by statistics, here, I mean the production and distribution of quantitative data, the old sense of statistics (vital statistics, censuses, national income statistics, etc.), and not the inferential field we know and love today.

This phrase came to mind today as I was reading through a March, 1932 interview with Senator La Follette* about the need for better economic statistics to improve economic planning in the midst of the depression. The interview is chock full of great quotes that give you a flavor of what it was like to live in a time before the CPS, NIPA, and all the other routine, standardized, official data we take for granted. For example:

It is a sad commentary on our statistical information that in the third winter of the depression we have absolutely no authoritative official figures on unemployment. The only data we have are those collected by the census in 1930 for the country as a whole and for certain cities in January 1931.

The authoritative bit here was to be important, too, as FDR and Hoover fought in the 1932 campaign over whose (partial, non-standardized) unemployment figures were better.

The belief that gets me, though, and that seems to be widely shared across the political spectrum at this point, is that just having good data will fix all kinds of ideological disputes. It was this belief, in part, that motivated the founding of the NBER, and it was this belief that animated Hoover to work to produce all kinds of economic reports in the 1920s and early 1930s in concert with economists and businessmen (e.g. Recent Economic Trends, Recent Social Trends, etc.). La Follette was a Republican also, but later founded the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and clearly believed in less business-led solutions to economic problems than Hoover, but he had the same attitude of statistical optimism. A quote from the end of the interview about the potential for authoritative statistics to prevent future depressions struck me as especially relevant and, from a post-2008 perspective, ironic:

Suppose late in 1928 some authoritative body in Washington had publicly emphasized the fact that there was an excess of private houses on the market. Suppose it had pointed out that construction figures showed an appreciable falling off in the building of new houses. Surely in the light of such warnings people would not have continued investing their hard-earned savings in first and second mortgage real estate bonds thus increasing the supply of new capital for speculative building which continued into 1929.

If only it were so.

Though, I suppose, in fairness to La Follette, what he called for was not simply the creation of better data but also the creation of an institution – a national economic council, somewhat of a precursor to what ended up being the Council of Economic Advisers – that would have the authority to interpret data, not just collect it. Still, the optimism is palpable, and from our vantage point, tragic.

* La Follette is important in my work because he introduced a resolution in 1932 which called for the creation of the first** official US national income estimates.
** Well, he thought they were the first, and so do most people. The FTC actually produced an estimate in 1926, but almost no one knows about it, and no one did much with it then either.

The 2014 Junior Theorists Symposium is just three weeks away! Below, please find an updated schedule. JTS 2014 will be held at the University of California Berkeley in 60 Evans Hall. A complete list of paper abstracts is available here (pdf link). If you have any questions, please contact Jordanna Matlon and myself at juniortheorists@gmail.com.

2:00 – 3:50 | Place and Perspective
* Hillary Angelo (New York University) – “From the City as a Lens to Urbanization as a Way of Seeing: Refocusing Social Categories for an Urban Planet”
* Jennifer Carlson (University of Toronto) – “Citizen-Protectors: Guns, Masculinity and Citizenship in an Age of Decline”
* Victoria Reyes (Princeton University) – “Global Borderlands: A Case Study of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines”Discussant: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)

The Junior Theorists Symposium is an open event. In order to facilitate planning, please RSVP by sending an email to juniortheorists@gmail.com with the subject line “JTS RSVP.” We suggest an on-site donation of $20 per faculty member and $10 per graduate student to cover event costs.

First, a bit of housekeeping. I’ve been officially recruited onto the Scatterplot blogging team. So, for the time being, substantive posts about sociology and related topics will likely be posted over there (e.g. this piece on clarifying the debate over replication in the social sciences). I’ll save this blog for more personal updates and shameless self-promotion.

Speaking of which… I’m very excited for this year’s ASA in SF! If you want to hear what I’m up to or say hi, you can find me at two fantastic events. The first is the Junior Theorists Symposium, which I’m co-organizing with Jordanna Matlon. We’ll be posting the paper abstracts and further details next week, and I’ll make sure to link them here. Please RSVP if you’d like to attend! JTS will be held at the University of California, Berkeley on Friday, August 15 (the day before ASA proper begins in earnest). Old announcement with details here.

The second is a panel on “Credit and Inequality: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Greta Krippner and I will be presenting our first paper from a new collaboration on the politics of pricing in insurance and credit. This paper looks at the fascinating legal and legislative contention in the 1980s over the use of gender in risk-based pricing of life and auto insurance.* The panel is Sunday, 2:30-4:10pm.

Hope to see you all there!

* Ok, I admit, few people would normally use “fascinating” to describe any aspect of “insurance pricing.” But believe me, it’s a really rich space to see the workings out of various logics of fairness, discrimination, and the meaning of “individual treatment” in the context of statistical models of risk – questions that rate to be ever more relevant as more and more aspects of our lives are connected to predictive algorithms.

As some readers of this blog may know, there’s been a debate over the past few years about what to do with a large collection of archival material held by the American Sociological Association. Specifically at issue are the editorial records of the ASA journals (ASR, Sociological Theory, etc.) from 1991-2009. The ASA council no longer feels that it is worth the expense to warehouse the records in physical form, and is also unwilling to put up the required cash – $120,000 – to digitize the lot. Instead, in an act of uncharacteristic thriftiness, ASA has punted the problem to its members. If we can raise the money by next year, they will happily digitize the records. If not, whatever we can’t pay to digitize will be destroyed.

Led by Alan Sica and Charles Camic, a group of sociologists have organized to try to fundraise to Save Our Archival Records. For more information on the campaign, go to their website. You can donate directly to the effort there, or through ASA’s page. Thanks!

Given that I’m writing a dissertation on the history of national income accounting, I hate to say this, but… GDP just isn’t as important as some people want to make it out to be. Some of the worst offenders in this genre of claim seem to be, unsurprisingly, GDP’s biggest critics. Let’s take an example from an op-ed in this week’s New York Times*, Our Mismeasured Economy by Lew Daly at Demos. The editorial follows in a nearly 100-year old tradition of criticizing how national income statistics handle hard to measure, non-market production, in this case government output. Daly argues, sensibly enough, that the way we handle government is ad hoc and arbitrarily rules out the possibility that government could actually add value (we explicitly assume that the value of government output is equal to what we pay for it, no more, no less).

That’s all well and good, but what bothers me is the over-the-top way in which Daly motivates his critique. Here’s the opening line:

Today’s polarized debates about the role of government often boil down to a single issue: the size of government compared with the size of the overall economy, as measured in gross domestic product.

Really? Are we following the same debates? Because although I’ve certainly seen reference to the size of government (and in fact, we see examples of these claims as far back as the early 1930s), they do not seem to me to be a dominant mode of debate at the present juncture. To be fair to Daly, I have not done a systematic content analysis of contemporary ‘debates about the role of government’, but I would be shocked if even a small percentage of these debates (5%?) explicitly or implicitly referenced the size of government as measured in the national accounts. And far fewer “boil down to a single issue” in those terms. Think, for example, of the recent Hobby Lobby case, and other debates around the Affordable Care Act. This debate is about ‘the role of the government’, but it’s not about the ‘size’ of the government but about its intrusiveness: can the government mandate that private companies provide certain kinds of care to their workers? Think also of the NSA wiretapping scandals. Again, the proper role of the government is at the center of the debate, but not the government’s size as a percentage of GDP.

Daly’s op-ed makes a number of sensible points about what we miss if we focus our debate on the productivity of government on the national accounts (though I’m not sure I agree that the fix is to change how we measure GDP as opposed to, say, coming up with alternative measurements of government productivity and restricting our analysis of GDP to where such a number makes the most sense – GDP is built on a bedrock of “market epistemology”**, and I doubt it will ever move far from that principle). But there’s no need to tee those claims up with an overblown one about the centrality of GDP to contemporary political debates about the role of the government.*** GDP is important because of its diffuse implications for how we think about the world, as well as some more narrow technical uses (such as the World Bank’s categorization of “least developed” countries, see, e.g, Jerven’s work) – but it’s not quite so woven into technical systems as, say, inflation statistics, which directly determine wage increases and social security benefits. And so I get that it’s a bit tougher to talk about why getting GDP ‘right’ is so important. But maybe that means we should be having a different debate, about what the right ways to measure and think about the productivity of government are, rather than a narrow technical one about GDP. Somehow I doubt that the Tea Party is going to stop complaining about the Affordable Care Act if the government’s share of GDP goes down a point.

* H/T to Beth Berman for sending this piece along.
** I define market epistemology as the belief that markets provide the best or only definitive information about economic value. Market epistemology shapes debates about the production boundary and in turn the boundary of the economy – that is, it shapes what we decide to count and how we decide to count it, especially for difficult cases like unpaid housework, government output, and owner-occupied housing. See, e.g., chapter 4 of the dissertation I should be writing instead of this blog post!
*** At this point, I’d also like to fully embrace the irony of using a single editorial as a case to motivate a more general argument about the perils of motivating a general argument about discourse from a handful of cases. I can dig up more if you’d really like, I read this stuff for a living.

I just wrote a my first post on Scatterplot, about the debate over the recent Facebook emotions study. For at least a little bit, I’ll likely be blogging over there. Since I imagine my readership overlaps a fair bit, I will likely not cross-post most of the content, unless I want to keep a record over here for my own purposes. Either way, if you’re interested in the Facebook debate, please check out my post and let me know what you think!

The newest issue of Sociological Theory was just released. Several of the articles look fascinating, but with my spare time between reading a 400p congressional hearing and (failing) to read an 1100p congressional hearing, I had time to look at just one: For “Central Conflation”: A Critique of Archerian Dualism by Tero Piiroinen. I admit, I was a bit skeptical at first: like many others in the sociology blogosphere, I’m a bit sick of the endless debates over critical realism. That said, having invested the time to make sense of critical realism enough to follow said debates, I was interested to hear what this new critique had to say about the topic. I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Taking a side in the debate over ontological emergentism in social theory, this article defends an outlook that Margaret S. Archer has dubbed “central conflation”: an antidualistic position appreciating the interdependency of agency and structure, individuals and society. This has been a popular outlook in recent years, advocated broadly by such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, and Anthony Giddens. However, antidualism has been challenged by those who believe the key to success in social science lies in level-ontological emergentism. Archer’s own morphogenetic theory is an explicitly dualist version of that approach. I answer Archer’s arguments for emergentism, in so doing clearing a path for the even fuller acceptance of antidualism by theorists.

In short, the paper argues against the implicit or explicit dualism of much of sociology, expressed most fully in Archer’s account of agency and structure. Archer names this antidualism position the “central conflation”, and Piiroinen embraces that label and wants to turn it – and antidualism – into badges of pride. To do so, Piiroinen draws on a diverse set of authors – Giddens and Bourdieu, but also Elias, Latour and especially Dewey – to argue that individuals are inherently social, and thus to deny the problem of the emergence of society from individuals. Here’s a Dewey quote to that effect from the paper (p. 86):

Then “society” becomes an unreal abstraction and “the individual” an equally unreal one. . . . [And] there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be united in societies and groups: the individual and the social are now opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling” them.

Piiroinen reiterates a basic insight, expressed nicely in Callon and Latour’s (1981) agenda-setting piece on “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan”, that the micro- and macro- are not the same as the agent and the structure, or really all that different except as analytical tools and questions to be investigated (p. 91):

As antidualists deny any metaphysical hiatus between micro-scale agency and macro-scale structures, they encourage us to effortlessly zoom back and forth between the micro and the macro: to zoom as close to small-scale encounters and as far back to the consistencies of large-scale dynamics as needed to understand the spatiotemporal chunks of the social practices of people-in-relations that are most relevant for the case at hand, in all their relevant details and big-picture connections. And, arguably, antidualists manage this precisely because they avoid the self-appointed problematic of the linkage between individuals’ inter- actions and sociocultural systems.

I like it!

Beyond tickling my theoretical fancy, the paper has some lovely bits of writing and great short examples when it moves to critiquing Archer’s understanding of culture from this antidualist perspective (great examples, that is, if you’re a massive nerd who loves seeing Comic Con and cosplay mentioned in one of the discipline’s top journals) (p. 93):

Consider someone cheerfully identifying himself as a “nerd” or “geek” and dressing up as a “stormtrooper” (from the Star Wars movies) to participate in the Comic-Con event in San Diego, socializing with countless likeminded people who share with him similar identities and may also dress up as stormtroopers, or as “Princess Leia,” “Spider-Man,” “Dracula,” a “barbarian warlord,” “little grey man”* or “zombie,” or any of thousands of iconic pop culture characters or archetypes instantly recognizable and meaningful to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Notice that logic and reasoning play no important role in that regard. There are true and false propositions that can be formed about pop cultural items, and there are even more vaguely explicable “intelligibilia,” as Archer (1995:180) calls them, “item[s] that have the dispositional capacity of being understood by someone,” but understandability, to say nothing of logical consistency, is not a key notion in sociology of culture, it is not why cultural phenomena are sociologically important. Rather, they are important because there are people who care—rather passionately—about those items and interact with others who also care about them. It is a social affair.

Following this paper, I think my new favorite critique is going to be, “yeah, but can your theory explain cosplay?”

My only real criticism of the paper is that it spends so much time beating up on critical realism and Archer in particular, and thus spends less time than it could developing the implications for research that come from adopting a conflationist antidualist perspective. Hopefully, in future work, Piiroinen and others will pick up from this place to answer that question, and in so doing, perhaps help attract more interest from empirically-minded scholars who sometimes slip into the dualist framing but couldn’t be bothered to read one more piece for or against critical realism.

* I feel like I might lose nerd cred for saying this, but is little grey men the Finnish term for little green men? Or is it some cool new nerd reference that I just don’t get?